Richard Ishida, team contact for the W3C Internationalization Working Group, presented as part of a panel discussion
to a meeting of the UK Usability Professionals Association, 22 April, in London. Title of his talk:
Don’t Blame the Localizers! [PDF 715Kb]. The talk presented some examples of
how designers and developers shoulder much responsibility in enabling internationalization of products.

The Internationalization Working Group has published the Character
Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 in two parts: Fundamentals in Last Call through 19
March, and Normalization. The documents address character encoding identification,
early uniform normalization, string identity matching, string indexing, and URI conventions. They build on the Universal Character Set defined by
Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646.

The Guidelines, Education & Outreach Task Force (GEO) of the Internationalization Working
Group is now publishing information about weekly additions to its list of W3C
Internationalization FAQs via an RSS
feed. RSS ("RDF Site Summary") is an RDF Vocabulary that provides a lightweight multipurpose extensible
metadata description and syndication format. In short, it is a means for describing news and events so that they can be shared across the web in a
timely manner.

ISO has issued a response
regarding expressions of concern over a Commercial Policies
Steering Group (CPSG) proposal to charge for the use of certain ISO codes, including those for languages (ISO 639) and countries (ISO 3166). In
summary, " ISO is to continue with its established practice of allowing free-of-charge use of its country, currency and language codes from,
respectively, the ISO 3166, ISO 4127 and ISO 639 standards, in commercial and other applications."

A paper by Richard Ishida called "An Introduction to Indic Scripts" has been published as Unicode Technical Note #10. This paper provides an introduction to the major Indic scripts used on the
Indian mainland. Those addressed in this paper include specifically Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and
Telugu.

Updated for The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Unicode in
XML and other Markup Languages has been republished as a Unicode Technical Report and a W3C Note. These guidelines cover the use of
Unicode with markup languages such as XML. They are published jointly by the Unicode Technical Committee and
the W3C Internationalization Working Group and Interest Group. Read about the W3C Internationalization
Activity.

Volunteers have contributed thousands of hours translating W3C publications into more than 30 languages. Showcasing
W3C Semantic Web, XML and internationalization technologies, data for volunteer translations of W3C
technical reports and related documents is now maintained in RDF encoded in XML. Combining this
metadata with other RDF, the translation index makes extensive use of Unicode, links
to official versions, and can be viewed according to language or technology. Read the project description and please visit
Translations at W3C.

The GEO Task Force of the Internationalization Working Group has released the first Working Draft of
Framework Document for i18n Guidelines. This describes plans for producing guidelines on
internationalization of W3C technologies. The Task Force encourages feedback about the content of this document as well as participation in the
development of the guidelines by people who have experience creating Web content that conforms to internationalization needs.

W3C acknowledges the Submission of
Embedding Glyph Identifiers in XML Documents (EGIX) by GLOCOM,
Infoteria, and Media Fusion. From the
W3C Team Comment: EGIX proposes a new XML namespace with a single attribute
containing a glyph identifier. This allows distinguishing different glyph variants of the same character, or to identify glyphs where the
corresponding character has not yet been encoded. This is of importance in particular for East Asian Ideographs (漢字), but also for other
areas. Acknowledgement of a Submission does not imply any endorsement or commitment by W3C (Process Document).

Misha Wolf has retired from his role as Chair of the W3C Internationalization Group. Misha was one of the original
founders of the working group in February 1998, and has chaired it since then. His "years of ardent, often animated and always enthusiastic service
to the Internationalization community" were recognised by Tim Berners-Lee. Tim added his personal "thanks to Misha for all he has done, and to
Reuters for supporting his excellent work". Misha's energy and dedication will be missed. Richard Ishida will take over as chair.

The new Working Group Charter outlines three
main areas of activity proposed during the Internationalisation Workshop of February 2002. In addition to the ongoing work of reviewing
specifications from other working groups and completing current document deliverables, new areas include Web services internationalization, and
guidelines, education and outreach. Three task forces are proposed to manage the work: a Core task force, a Web Services task force, and a
Guidelines, Education, Outreach (GEO) task force. There is also a new charter for the
Interest Group.

This web site has been given a new look and feel to allow for significant, ongoing expansion as a web
internationalization resource over the coming months. The initial adaptation of the web site adds very little new material but aims to help people
find existing information more easily. As the work of the Internationalization Activity develops over the coming months, it is hoped that the current
information will be refined, and new material will be added. We welcome your comments and suggestions about the
new design.